Page 11 of Reaper's Brat

"Got it," Caelis breathes. "Thea, we got it."

That's when the corridor floods with emergency foam from a burst line further up, and the comms cut, and for a span of minutes the rest of the ship has no idea whether the two people who went into the reactor space came back out of it.

When I climb out, coated in foam and shaking, Saren is in the corridor.

I have never seen his face do what it does. The captain is simply gone. What's left is something raw and very young, a man who'd been told the thing he loves was dead and had started, in some interior room, to accept it. He crosses the distance in two strides and pulls me off my feet and against him, and he doesn't care that the whole watch crew is standing right there, doesn't care that he's broadcasting the one weakness a Reaper captain can't afford, just holds me hard enough to bruise and presses his mouth to my hair and says my name into it like he's checking it still fits.

The crew sees all of it. There's no unseeing it.

Over Saren's shoulder I find Theryn at the end of the corridor, not moving, watching his captain come apart over a human, and I watch him do the math I've watched him do before — except this time something in his face finishes the sum and goes quiet and certain, and I do not like it at all.

CHAPTER 18

SAREN

"You're not sleeping," Elsyn says, which is his way of asking a question he already knows the answer to.

I'm in the medical bay because it's the one room she isn't in, and being where she isn't has become the closest thing to discipline I have left. "I sleep when she's beside me. I don't, when she's not. Make of that what you will."

"I'll make the truth of it." He sets down the salve he's grinding. "Separation is starting to cost you physically. You feel it — the ache when she's two decks away, the way your attention drags toward her like a compass needle. That's not weakness and it's not madness. It's the bond doing what it was built to do, which is make two people unwilling to be a danger to each other through distance and neglect." He fixes me with his failing eyes. "The danger is in fighting it. A bond half-accepted is the worst of both — all the need, none of the steadiness. You are living in the half, Saren, and it is making you exactly the thing you're afraid of becoming."

"Possessive," I say. "I put a smuggler against a wall for touching her arm."

"Then stop starving the thing and feed it, and watch the teeth go back in." He says it dryly, and I almost laugh, which surprises us both.

I find her after, in the galley, and instead of standing guard at a careful distance I sit down across from her with a bowl of the same poor stew everyone eats, and we share a meal like two ordinary people, and it is the most frightening thing I have done in years.

"Tell me a thing you wanted," I say. "Before Armstrong taught you not to."

She thinks. "A door that locked from the inside," she says. "That's it. That's the whole dream. A room that was mine, with a lock only I held, where nobody could decide what to do with me while I slept." She looks at the stew. "Stupid, for a dream."

"It is the least stupid dream I have ever heard." And because she has given me hers, I give her mine, which I have never said aloud: "Children who carve for beauty instead of grief. A generation of us who do not know the taste of famine. I used to think wanting that was an insult to everyone who died not getting it." I turn the bowl in my hands. "You are making me think it might be the opposite."

She reaches across the table and hooks her fingers through mine, and for one watch the ship stops feeling like a thing we are only waiting to die aboard. It is a home with two people in it learning each other's wants.

And because it is, I let myself stop listening — for one meal, one watch — to the cold voice that has not gone quiet since the relay room, the one that knows a hand at my own table has been feeding us out into the dark and has not yet let me learn whose. I will pay for the quiet later. Every captain pays for every quiet eventually. For the length of this one meal I decide the bill is worth it, and I let her fill the silence where the dread usually sits.

CHAPTER 19

ALTHEA

Vasha makes me something with her own hands, and I'm told later she hasn't done that for anyone in ten years.

It's small — a token of dark metal, no bigger than my thumb, carved with a knot of lines I can't read and a single Ishani word I can.Kin.She presses it into my palm at the next remembrance gathering, in front of the whole crew, with the particular gruffness of someone doing a tender thing and daring you to make it weird.

"You held the line in the reactor space," she says. "You held people down on the medical floor who'd have killed you a month before. You don't get to be cargo anymore. The clan votes you're not." A pause, and then, lower, just for me: "I lost a daughter, before. To the famines. You're not her. But you fill a space I'd stopped admitting was empty, and I'm too old to keep pretending it isn't filled." She squeezes my hand hard around the token, once, and steps back into her own gruffness before I can wreck us both with my face.

The gathering is different from the first one I saw. Looser. People tell stories that aren't only grief — somebody does an impression of a captain three captains back that has the old hands roaring, and Caelis sings a snatch of one of the recordingsand gets it wrong and gets corrected by four people at once, all of them delighted to remember the right of it.

I tell them about Tomas — not the dying, they have enough dying; the living. How he saved a heel of bread for me every shift and lied that he wasn't hungry. How he laughed like it cost him nothing in a place where everything cost everything. And eighty Reapers who'd have spaced me at the start sit in the oil-light and listen to a human grieve a human, and nod, because grief is the one language we turned out to already share.

Saren watches from the edge with the token's twin in his look — like he's been handed something he doesn't know where to put. When the gathering breaks he comes to me and doesn't say anything, just takes my hand and turns it over and traces the carved word in my palm with one claw-tipped finger, gentle as anything that size has a right to be.

"They beat me to it," he says quietly. "Claiming you. I was going to be brave about it eventually."

"Eventually," I echo. "Reaper for 'never,' near as I can tell."

He huffs a laugh, and it's almost a real one. And then the proximity klaxon opens up across the ship, and the screens swing aft, and it isn't one warship this time. It's a formation — Jorek's whole pack, fanning into the sector we've just been spat into, exactly where the storm let us go, exactly where no one should have known to look.